(Michael) Bruce Sterling (1954– ) is an influential US science fiction author often cited as a founder of the cyberpunk genre, along with William Gibson. In collaboration, Gibson and Sterling could be said to have jump-started the steampunk genre as well, with their novel The Difference Engine. Sterling set parameters for cyberpunk in his polemical fanzine Cheap Truth (1984–86), making his case in part by criticizing Humanists like Kim Stanley Robinson. Since that time, both writers have made major contributions to our understanding of modern life, in vastly different ways. Robinson has arguably become the most important climate change fiction writer in the world and Sterling has been invaluable as a ceaseless critic and analyst of the postcapitalist Baudrillardian world.
Sterling’s fiction has won two Hugo Awards in addition to the Hayakawa Book Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Campbell Award. However, Sterling has been equally fascinating and adroit in his perceptive nonfiction, while his work editing the seminal Mirrorshades anthology (1986) helped define cyberpunk for a generation of readers. Sterling cofounded the legendary Turkey City writer’s workshop in Austin, Texas, and famously coined the term slipstream (1989, in the magazine Science Fiction Eye) to describe cross-genre fiction that did not easily fit into a particular category. Other terms coined by Sterling include Wexelblat disaster (1999), for when a natural disaster triggers a secondary failure of human technology, and buckyjunk, in a 2005 issue of Wired, which refers to future, difficult-to-recycle consumer waste made of carbon nanotubes.
Sterling’s novels include Islands in the Net (1988), Heavy Weather (1994), and The Caryatids (2009). Stand-alone stories like the oft-reprinted “We See Things Differently” in the legendary Semiotext(e) anthology (1989) amply demonstrate Sterling’s versatility in his short fiction.
But he is perhaps best known for his stories set in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, featuring a colonized solar system caught between two major warring factions: the Mechanists, who use computer-based mechanical tech, and the Shapers, who deploy species-wide genetic engineering. Over time, this binary opposition is complicated by the arrival of different alien civilizations and the splintering of humanity into many posthuman subspecies. The Shaper/Mechanist stories can be found in the collections Crystal Express and Schismatrix Plus.
“Swarm” is a brilliant example of these stories, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1982 and nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. In the story, Captain Simon Afriel is tasked with researching a little-known life-form called the Swarm, initially thought to be unintelligent. What ensues is unpredictable, exciting, and thought-provoking—like all of Sterling’s fiction. It’s also undeniably “post cyberpunk.”